When looking at free video editing software for the mac, there are few choices other than Apple’s own iMovie. I took time to look at two, Avidemux2 and t@b ZS4 video editor.

t@b ZS4 video editor is touted as a full featured video editor, and while it offers some nice bells and whistles such as green screen or blue screen keying, and other effects. It is a very slow and cumbersome tool to use. I had to stop several times in order to let it catch up with what I wanted to do. The opening and saving files was not in a familiar format. Even when I went back to the website to see about machine specifications their site recognized problems with G5 systems (pre Intel) and did not specifically state actual requirements to run the software.

Avidemux2 is a simple video editor that is almost a scaled down version of what Apple’s Quicktime Pro does. While it does not offer the extra features t@b ZS4 or even iMovie offers, it does to a great job of cutting, pasting, and appending video and audio. It is not the cleanest interface, but it does get the job done for simple splicing clips together.

In my use of various tools that I have learned to use over the years, I find that many video editing tools can be complicated at first use and often take time experimenting to get a good feel of how they work. My students at school use Adobe Premier elements, Windows Movie Maker and even Adobe After effects, If w were to have to use free or open source tools, I can’t say I would recommend teaching with either of these tools. Maybe Avidemux2 for a short segment in the Multimedia / Digital Interactive Media course, but really they are both very limited. In the end I think it will be important for students to learn to use any video editing tool as we become a more multimedia oriented culture.

If I did not have iMovie or Quicktime Pro, I would use Avidemux2 for simple editing of movies. I will show some basic editing with Avidemux2 in my video blog.

After using Avidemux2 I have decided that for my project I will stay with iMovie since it is also a free solution. The problems I had with Avidemux is that it was not very friendly to use, it did crash on me, and integrating filters and editing clips was often time consuming.